Northwood Little League

Jason Quimby with Northwood Little League shares his top tips for running athlete evaluations, and how using SkillShark has saved his staff ample time and manpower following tryouts.

What is your top tip for other coaches running athlete evaluations?

Lay out what drills you want to run, customize a standardized evaluation template, and assign who will be placed at each station. Plan ahead as much as possible, so when the day of an evaluation comes, everything runs smoothly.

What’s the biggest challenge or pain when running evaluations?

Maintaining consistency across evaluators. Without structured evaluation templates and providing them a clear outline of what each score means, evaluations won’t end up being accurate or fair.

What has been the biggest benefit of using SkillShark for your tryouts?

The amount of manpower and time saved. After tryouts, we no longer require multiple staff to manually transfer data from paper to spreadsheets and generate reports—a process that would take us hours!

With SkillShark, our evaluators enter scores directly on their mobile devices, and detailed reports are instantly generated for us once the evaluation is complete. Within minutes, I can comb through the reports and uncover valuable insights, which help me identify our top players for the season.

How do you provide feedback to your athletes?

Right now, we conduct clinics that are solely focused on athlete development and feedback. During these clinics, we run standard drills (similar to ones we run at practices) and bring in professionals to provide verbal feedback to athletes.

In the future, we do plan to use SkillShark’s athlete report cards to provide our athletes with written feedback throughout the year.